There's this big outdoor store that has recently opened by my place of employ. It is a huge two-story behemoth of a store in the middle of what is basically a business park. The only non-businessy type place in proximity to it is a big civic/arena type deal that has quite possibly some of the weirdest sports events I've seen lately. Monster trucks and arena rugby (there is an audience for this in Chicago) are just a smapling of the strange things that take place nearby.

Anyhoo, on Saturday Martin and I ventured to said outdoor store. Now, one reason I had been wanting to go for the past few months is that the store had slowly been erecting little brown signs in the vicinity directing us to the "Museum." When the store opened late last yearsthey even rented one of those big orange flashy "Oh crap, there's road work" signs to direct people where to park. there were billboards everywhere and at every possible turn in to the business park where I work there were these big AND small signs about the so-called museum. Curiousity being what it is I wanted to see the museum myself. Well, if a museum is a huge store selling stuffed animals, clothing, rifles, deer blinds, the entire Ted Nugent Collection of cross-bows surrounding a large mound of fake landscape where there is perched every possible animal capable of being stuffed and put on display, then you've got a museum. I know that most natural history museums have their fill of dead animals. Heck, I love what the National Museum of Natural History did with the hall of mammals. But, this is a store. A commercial outlet. It is NOT, by any means, a museum. There is an aquarium containing about 20 or so freshwater rainbow trout. It doesn't say anywhere near the fish what they are, where they come from, what they eat, whether they contain huge amounts of mercury or toxins. Nothing, zilch, nada. All the stuffed animals? the previously alive ones I mean...they have a cute little sign under them describing what they are: Muskrat, Wolverine, Moose, Mountain Goat. No little map telling about their habitat or what they like to munch on. Weird weird weird. It seems to me that the store wanted to advertise on every street corner because of their, let's face it, bizarre choice of location. To do that they had to come up with some strange scheme that they were providing some sort of learning experience. What I saw instead were eight years olds with those old-timey pop rifles shooting at a stuffed elephant.